Emile Zola Quotations

If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.

In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.

The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.

One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

I am an artist... I am here to live out loud.

Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.

The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.

The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Tis better to plumb the depths of unity than forever scratch the surface of variety

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: ""I am here to live out loud

Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy -- love which creates life?

Yes! live life with every fibre of one's being, surrender oneself to it, with no thoughts of rebellion, without deluding oneself that one can improve it and render it painless.

Lovers are made by a kiss.

My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

Paris flared -- Paris, which the divine sun had sown with light, and where in glory waved the great future harvest of Truth and of Justice.

Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.

It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.

If something's just, I'll let myself be hacked to bits for it.

When you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other.

Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

Respectable people... What bastards!

When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are made by a kiss.

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

Violence has never prospered, you can't remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!

Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?

The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.

What will be the death of me are buillabaisses, food spiced with pimiento, shellfish, and a load of exquisite rubbish which I eat in disproportionate quantities.

Every wave is a water sprite who swims in the current, each current is a path which snakes towards my palace, and my palace is fluidly built at the bottom of the lake, in the triangle of earth, fire and water.

The camembert with its venison scent defeats the Marolles and Limbourg dull smells; It spreads its exhalation, smothering the other scents under its surprising breath abundance.

The conclusion does not belong to the artist.

When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.

I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.

Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.

Art for me...is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.

Why is it that my heart is so touched whenever I meet a dog lost in our noisy streets? Why do I feel such anguished pity when I see one of these creatures coming and going, sniffing everyone, frightened, despairing of even finding its master?

She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.

Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.

Don't go looking at me like that because you'll wear your eyes out.

The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

And that wreched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation: 'What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!' " - 'Joy of Life

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here

I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.

It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!

In Paris, everything's for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure.

The vague torment of ... ambition.

When sometimes, behind his back, they called him a tyrant, he merely smiled and uttered this profound observation: If some day I turn liberal, they will say I have let them down.

It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break.

They talked so, with secret hearts, without needing words, talking of other things... They could have suddenly continued their confessions aloud, without ceasing to understand each other.

Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.

The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.

Everything is only a dream.

It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer.

If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.

A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.

From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied.

When truth is buried, it grows. It chokes. It gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.

Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth.

The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one's intellect to know it better.

An entire lifetime would not be long enough for you to exhaust the glance of the young harvest-girl.

Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.

Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.

Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.

Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.

Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers.

The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

Man's highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.

Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.

In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.

Nothing develops intelligence like travel.

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy.

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.